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Mom, When They Look at Me, They See Dollar Signs

How rehab recruiters are luring recovering opioid addicts into a deadly cycle.

The offer was too good to resist: Go to rehab for a week, get $1,000 in cash. It was early 2017, and Brianne, a 20-year-old from a woody Atlanta suburb, had come to South Florida to leave her heroin addiction behind. At a residential facility called Recovery Villas of the Treasure Coast, she was approached by a charismatic guy I’ll call Daniel, a Pennsylvania native six years her elder. He could relate to her troubles—he’d struggled with addiction himself—and he could get her into another rehab after Recovery Villas. He would even pay her: $1,000 for the first week of her stay and $500 each week thereafter. That money could buy Brianne a whole lot of heroin. more….

On a spring morning in 2017, in a Grand Hyatt ballroom in midtown Manhattan, Michael Cartwright took the stage and talked about growth. “There’s no great brand out there like Nike, whatever you consider a great brand out there today, that doesn’t have a great sales and marketing platform,” he told the audience of health care investors and executives attending a UBS-sponsored confab. That’s why, Cartwright said, his company—American Addiction Centers, the nation’s only publicly traded addiction treatment chain—had built a thriving marketing machine. more….

The women and girls who come to Timberline Knolls are in crisis. They arrive at the nationally recognized treatment center after suicide attempts, addicted to drugs, overwhelmed by mood and eating disorders.

But instead of finding safe harbor, some reported being traumatized in new and horrible ways.

Cook County prosecutors allege that a Timberline Knolls counselor, Mike Jacksa, sexually assaulted or abused six patients last year at the leafy 43-acre rehab center in suburban Lemont. Former patients told police that Jacksa subjected them to rape, forced oral sex, digital penetration and fondling beneath their clothes. He faces 62 felony charges. more….